Thursday, October 20, 2011

First Prize: 2011 Teens Between Cultures Prose Contest

At age five, the only thing that separates you
and your seatmate in class is, well, nothing. His sandwich is as good as
your packed Korean food, and your handwriting is just as good as his.
You play with the same lego blocks and throw around the same rocks
during recess, and you even share bits of your lunch.

At age nine, you’ve measured the length of your table and found where
the halfway mark is, and then drawn a shaky line across your table.
That’s all that separates you from your seatmate that, and that he’s a
boy, with cooties. He still reaches across and slaps your arm
when he’s feeling manly, and you can still extend your leg to kick his
knee in retaliation.

At age thirteen, you learn a new word : racism. You’ve learned it in
classrooms before, since a young age, since you can actually remember
history class. You’ve learned about the slave trade, and you know the
dictionary definition of the word. But you really learn it - see it,
hear it, experience it - when you’re thirteen, at the age where adding
the ‘F word’ before every word makes you look ‘mature’ and being racist
makes you ‘funny.’

Even though you’re not ‘white,’ you successfully avoid being bullied for
being Korean, because you were born here and you dress in Hollister and
you don’t have such an obvious accent.

Then you hit fourteen, and you become a little more aware of such a
thing as ‘popularity.’ You go for the latest trends even when you don’t
really like the clothes you’re buying, and your hair looks identical to
the girls in your posse: pin-straight hair with side-swept bangs, never
mind the hour it takes to iron your hair that way. But something’s a
little off, even when you sit with the ‘cool kids’ - you suddenly
realize there’s something more than just a pencil line separating you
and the rest, when they call you a ‘white-washed Asian.’

You’re louder than the one they nicknamed ‘the loud one,’ and you have
more shoes than the girl known for having a lot of shoes, but in the
end, you’re still ‘that white-washed Asian.’ Your skin color defines who
you are, forget the fact you’re really good at drawing and you can sing
really well.

You can read and write Korean and you can speak it, too, and you bring
Korean food to lunch. But you think being known for something is better
than not being known at all, so you avoid speaking in Korean around your
friends, and quietly, without a word, stop bringing lunch to school and
buy it instead.

Despite all this, you’re still labeled as ‘Asian.’ Every flaw is
‘because you’re Asian,’ and every talent is ‘because you’re Asian.’ Get a
bad grade in English?

“Well duh, you’re Korean!”

Yeah, that, and you were born in Los Angeles, California, and have never set foot in Korea.

Get a good grade in Math?
“Ugh, I hate you, why are you Asians so good at math?”

Maybe because you studied for four hours for that test? Using an American textbook?

Can’t drive that well?

“She’s Korean,” as if that explains everything.

But you smile and nod because amongst your white friends, you consider
yourself lucky to not be that other ‘Asian kid,’ who sits by himself
during lunch reading a book and munching on rice balls.

For a while, you go through a phase : the ‘wannabe’ phase. You won’t
dare let your friends know - your gang of entirely American friends -
but you start hating the black of your hair and the brown of your eyes,
and you start wanting their pale skin and blonde hair and blue eyes. You
give up Korean music entirely and you act annoyed when people talk in
Korean around you, and you go as far as to stow away your Korean books
when your friends come over.

When your mom drives you and your friend to the mall, she starts off
talking in Korean - but you cut her off, answering in English, because
you know she understands and you feel oddly embarrassed when your
friend, blonde and blue-eyed, turns a confused, amused smile towards you
at your mom’s Korean.

Your parents ask you what’s wrong - why you try to act like you’d prefer
a salad over kimchee, why you grimace in distaste when a Korean song
comes on the radio. You shrug it off, and say, “I’m not a fob.”

Your parents grow irritated, then angry: “You’re a Korean person! Be
proud of your heritage!” they say, but you can only feel a slight twang
of guilt beneath the desire to fit in. You don’t want to have your
merits and flaws accredited to ‘being Asian,’ and you don’t want to be
labeled as ‘the Asian.’

You hit fifteen, and when your parents say ‘Happy Birthday’ to you in
Korean, you stop being embarrassed. You stop wanting to have golden hair
and sapphire eyes, and you grow happy with your own. You realize the
term ‘comfortable in your own skin’ means a lot more than the simple
meaningless phrase you brushed off years ago.

You listen to a mix of Korean and English songs, and you’ll go back and
forth from Korean to English when speaking to your parents, even around
your friends. You’ll buy lunch sometimes, and on the days you feel like
it, eat your Korean food without the bat of an eye.

You realize your skin will stay the shade it is for the rest of your
life - and all that ‘separates’ you from your friends is not that you’re
Korean, but that you’re conscious of it.

To the comments ‘Because she’s Asian,’ you reply with a confident “Yeah I
am. And I write better English essays than you, so what of it?”

Because you’re a Korean-American, and you don’t have to be American to feel good.

Helen on Life Between Cultures:

The hardest part is the expectations that come with two cultures - it's
hard enough to try to fit into the American culture, but with one's
deep-rooted family continually forcing traditions upon you, it feels at
times like I have to 'choose.'

1 comment:

Nice essay! My daughter is bi-racial and I hope she is as proud to be herself as you are to be you. I am trying to raise her to be aware of both of her cultures and to understand what it means to be part of both.